The three men vying for the position of the mayor of New York City were not sparing of venomous attacks on their rivals at the last debate before the November 4 election on Wednesday evening.
Frontrunner Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, faced off with former Governor Andrew Cuomo, an independent, and Republican Curtis Sliwa at the event.
Recent polls have given Mamdani a double-digit lead over his two rivals.
What happened in the NYC mayoral debate?
Mamdani, 34, a member of the New York State Assembly, came under attack largely for his alleged inexperience.
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Cuomo, 67, said to him, “You have never had a job. You’ve never accomplished anything,” while Sliwa asserted that “Zohran, your resume could fit on a cocktail napkin.”
Mamdani, a Muslim, was also taken to task for his pro-Palestinian advocacy, with Sliwa even accusing the former of supporting “global jihad”despite Mamdani’s support of religious pluralism.
Cuomo also said that it would be a “dream” for US President Donald Trump — who has slammed Mamdani as being a dangerous “communist” — if the latter were to win.
“He [Trump] has said he’ll take over New York if Mamdani wins, and he will. Because he has no respect for him. He thinks he’s a kid and he’s going to kick him on his tuchus,” Cuomo said, using the New York slang word for “behind.”
Cuomo came under fire from both the other candidates over the sexual harassment allegations that led him to step down from office in 2021.
The former governor, who denies any wrongdoing, replied to Mamdani’s comments on this score: “If you want to be in government, then you have to be serious and mature.”
Sliwa, 71, accused his two rivals of “fighting like kids in a school yard” and sought to prove his own seriousness as a candidate, though he also showed himself not averse to delivering some pointed barbs.
“Andrew, your failures could fill a public school library in New York City,” he told Cuomo, among other jibes.
Both he and Cuomo have urged each other to drop out of the race so as to unite the anti-Mamdani vote behind one candidate.
Agreement on ICE raids
However, despite all their differences, all candidates criticized raids this week by immigration officials targeting vendors in Manhattan, during which 14 were arrested.
Cuomo said the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were overstepping their competence in dealing with offenses such as selling counterfeit bags.
Mamdani said he would oppose such federal interventions in the city if he became mayor, calling ICE “a reckless entity that cares little for the law and even less for the people that they’re supposed to serve.”
The winner of the mayoral election will succeed the incumbent Eric Adams, who dropped out of the mayoral race as an independent amid falling poll numbers. Adams had been under federal indictment on a number of fraud allegations until President Donald Trump urged a New York judge to drop the charges earlier this year.
Edited by: Elizabeth Schumacher
